He’s Met Bigfoot Since the 1970s… What It Told Him About Humans Is Shocking
The Silent Witness of Tucker County
By 1976, the world outside the mountain was changing. I’d hear snippets of it on my transistor radio—Watergate, the end of the war in Vietnam, the Bicentennial celebrations. But in my 55 acres of Tucker County, time had a different weight. Solomon wasn’t just a visitor anymore; he was a constant, a presence that made the woods feel lived-in rather than empty.
I had begun to notice that Solomon wasn’t alone. On several occasions, I saw smaller shapes moving through the thick laurel at the edge of the creek—juveniles, perhaps, or a mate. They never approached. Solomon was the bridge, the one who had decided that the man with the flannel-wrapped splint was a “known quantity.”
It was during the winter of 1977, the coldest I can ever remember in West Virginia, that the communication shifted from gestures to something deeper. The snow was four feet deep in the hollows, and the temperatures dropped so low that the trees would crack like pistol shots in the night. I was worried about Solomon. I left out extra suet and dried corn, though I knew it was a pittance for a creature of his size.
One night, the wind howling through the hemlocks, I heard a rhythmic thudding on the cabin wall. Not a scratch, not a predatory claw, but a deliberate, intelligent knock. I opened the door, and the cold hit me like a physical blow. Solomon was standing just outside the porch’s overhang. His breath came out in massive white plumes. He didn’t look for food. He looked at me, then gestured toward the woods, then back at the cabin. He let out a low, vibrating hum—a sound that I felt in my teeth.
He was warning me.
Two hours later, a massive oak, burdened by ice and age, came crashing down exactly where my pickup had been parked. I had moved the truck toward the meadow earlier that evening after Solomon’s visit, spurred by a nagging intuition I couldn’t name. He knew the mountain’s rhythms in a way that bypassed thought. He was the mountain.
The Lessons of the 1980s
As I moved into my fifties and sixties, my relationship with Solomon evolved into a silent apprenticeship. I stopped seeing him as a “cryptid” or a “monster.” To me, he was a person—just one who happened to belong to a branch of the family tree we’d managed to chop down everywhere else.
In the early 80s, I began to realize that Solomon didn’t just see the world; he felt it. I would sit on my porch with my coffee, and he would sit at the edge of the tree line, mimicking my posture. We would sit for hours. During these sessions, the “lessons” would happen. They weren’t spoken in English, but they were received in images and sensations.
I remember a particular afternoon in 1984. A logging crew had started work on the ridge about three miles over. The distant whine of chainsaws and the groan of falling timber echoed through the valley. Solomon appeared that evening, looking more agitated than I’d ever seen him. He didn’t pace; he vibrated with a kind of sorrow.
He came closer than usual—within fifteen feet. He picked up a handful of dirt, let it sift through his fingers, and then pointed toward the sound of the loggers. He made a sound like a weeping child, then gestured to his own chest, then to me.
The message was clear, and it was devastating: What you do to the earth, you do to yourselves.
He showed me, through a series of complex vocalizations and hand movements, that his people were the “Keepers.” They weren’t hiding because they were shy; they were hiding because we had become “The Great Forgetting.” He conveyed a sense that humans had once known the language of the wind and the water, but we had traded it for iron and noise. He looked at my wood stove, then at the forest, and I felt a wave of profound shame. He wasn’t judging me—Solomon didn’t seem capable of the petty malice humans harbor—he was mourning me. He was mourning all of us.
The Shocking Truth of 1991
The most transformative encounter happened in 1991. I was 63 years old. My joints were starting to ache, and the walk down to the creek was getting longer every year. Solomon, too, was showing his age. The silver in his coat had spread to his shoulders, and his movements were slower, more deliberate.
One evening, he did something he had never done. He walked right up to the porch steps and sat down. The wood groaned under his weight—I’d estimate he was well over 800 pounds of muscle and bone. I sat in my rocking chair, my heart hammering, not out of fear, but out of a sense of holy dread.
He reached out a hand—the same hand I had watched bleed twenty years prior—and touched the railing of my porch. Then, he looked me dead in the eye and spoke.
It wasn’t a human voice. It was a resonance that seemed to come from the earth itself, a series of clicks, glottal stops, and melodic hums. But as he spoke, images flooded my mind. I saw the mountains as they were before the coal mines, before the roads, before the first white settlers. I saw a world that was a single, breathing organism.
And then, he showed me us.
He showed me that humans are not “from” here in the way the trees and the bears are. We are the “Lost Children.” He conveyed that we are a species that has lost its “cord”—the connection to the Great Pulse. Because we are disconnected, we are afraid. And because we are afraid, we destroy.
The most shocking part wasn’t our destructive nature—I knew that from the evening news. It was the reason why they stayed away. It wasn’t survival instinct. It was pity.
Solomon showed me that his kind looks at humanity the way we might look at a frantic, starving dog that bites the hand trying to feed it. They don’t hate us. They are waiting for us to wake up, but they are increasingly certain that we will burn the house down before the sun rises.
“You think you are the masters,” the feeling of his words told me, “but you are the only things in the forest that don’t know who you are.”
The Parting
By the mid-90s, the “Bigfoot” craze was in full swing on television. Shows about monsters and “finding” the beast were everywhere. I watched them on a small battery-powered TV with a grainy signal and felt a deep, twisting irony. People were looking for a monster to hunt or a specimen to cage, never realizing that the “monster” was the only thing left on this planet that was truly sane.
In 1996, the end came. Not with a bang, but with a quiet departure.
I was 68, and my health was failing. My son, who lived in Ohio and whom I hadn’t seen much of since Clara died, was insisting I move closer to him. The cabin was becoming too much to manage.
The last time I saw Solomon was a Tuesday in August. The air was thick with the scent of pine and impending rain. He didn’t come to the porch. He stood in the middle of the meadow, bathed in the orange light of the setting sun. He looked magnificent—a prehistoric king of a disappearing realm.
He didn’t bring a gift. Instead, he placed both hands on the ground, bowed his head, and let out a long, mourning whistle that echoed off the ridges for what felt like minutes. Then, he looked at me one last time. There was no “goodbye” in his eyes, only a deep, ancient “remember.”
He turned and walked into the shadows of the hemlocks. I stayed on that porch until the stars came out, crying for the first time since my wife’s funeral. I wasn’t just crying for a friend; I was crying for the world we had forgotten.
The Secret in the Crate
I moved out of the cabin two months later. I sold the land to a conservation land trust, making them sign a dozen papers ensuring it would never be developed, never logged, and never “explored” for tourism. I told them I wanted the hemlocks to grow old in peace.
I am 94 years old now. I sit in this room with its sterile white walls and the smell of industrial floor cleaner. The nurses are kind, but they think I’m just another old man drifting into the fog of dementia when I talk about the “large man in the woods.”
But under my bed is that wooden crate.
Inside are the 11 journals. There are also three things the nurses haven’t found. One is a piece of dark, reddish-brown hair, nearly eight inches long, coarse and smelling faintly of cedar and ozone. The second is a stone, perfectly spherical and polished smooth, a gift Solomon gave me in 1988; no river in West Virginia could have tumbled a stone that perfectly.
The third is a single Polaroid photo.
I lied when I said I never used the camera on him. In 1980, on a morning when the light was just right, I snapped one picture of him sitting by the creek. It’s blurry, and the colors have faded to a sepia haze. To a scientist, it would be “inconclusive.” To a skeptic, it’s a “hoax.”
But when I look at it, I don’t see a “cryptid.” I see a teacher. I see a witness.
The world thinks it’s looking for Bigfoot. It doesn’t realize that Bigfoot is the one watching us, waiting for the day the “Lost Children” finally stop screaming and learn how to listen.
My name is Raymond Goss, and I am the last man who remembers the language of the mountain. I’m not afraid to die anymore. I know that when I close my eyes for the last time, I won’t be going into a dark void. I’ll be walking back into that meadow in Tucker County.
And Solomon will be waiting at the edge of the trees, ready to show me the rest of the story.
